Mobile devices are ubiquitous for business and personal use. Handheld mobile devices, sometimes referred to as mobile stations, are essentially portable computers having wireless capability, and come in various forms. These include Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), cellular phones and smart phones. Reduced size is an advantage to portability, but presents challenges to inputting and display of information. Some known solutions to these challenges include the incorporation of combined text-entry keyboard and telephone keypads on mobile devices such as cellular telephones, wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs), two-way messaging devices and others.
It is also known in the art to provide a primary keypad for a mobile communication device and a movable flip cover that contains a secondary keypad, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,226,501 (Weadon et al).
Further, CA 2,512,217 (Fyke et al) discloses a telephone keypad arranged on one side of a mobile communication device for providing an input signal corresponding to at least one telephone character, a keyboard arranged on the opposite side of the device for providing an input signal corresponding to at least one text character, where the telephone keypad is operable when the input device is in the first position, and the keyboard is operable when the input device is in the second position.
Moreover, it is also known in the art to provide mobile communication devices with touch-sensitive input screens, such as disclosed in US Patent Publication No. 2006/0066581 (Lyon et al).
Ergonomic comfort and facilitating fast and accurate text entry for e-mail, messaging, notes and other applications continue to pose challenges to the design of effective interfaces for such mobile devices.